Posted
by
samzenpus
on Wednesday August 01, 2012 @06:44PM
from the happy-birthday dept.

will_die writes "The Commodore 64 came out 30 years ago and to celebrate this the BBC went and got two groups of kids to try out an old system, complete with tape drive. It's sure to bring a few grins to people who had one of these old systems. From the article: 'The Commodore's ability to display 16 colours, smoothly scroll graphics and play back music through its superior SID (sound interface device) chip - even while loading programs off tape - helped win over fans, but it did not become the market leader until the late 1980s.'" Last spring a modern version of the C64 was released.

Because you were young back then. Your brain and body were at their peak. You could have learned Cantor's infinities at the same time as coding demos on the C64. You're probably middle-aged now, you're lucky if you're able to remember what you had for breakfast.

If you want to programme games there are. If you want to write machine code, just about every appliance has a computer in them, and they're all hardware limited. Depressingly, the best place to look for hardware limited code to write now commercially is with dishwashers and ovens and other simple appliances.

Amount of time it took a 6th grader to figure out that POKE 53281,0 turns the screen black: about 5 minutes.

Amount of time it took me as an adult ~20 years later, with ~7 years of postgraduate professional development experience, to figure out how to create a JFrame, open a JPanel on it, and fill it with black: about 3 hours, and that was with a few years of Java experience already under my belt. I shudder to think what would be involved trying to do it in C++ under Windows with MFC.

30 years ago, the essence of programming a Commodore 64 could be boiled down into a book with 500 pages, and made comfortably accessible with the addition of 2 or 3 more good books. Now, the fucking EULA pdf ALONE rambles on for close to 80, and a fairly complete set of books documenting nothing but J2SE 7 (with comprehensive treatment of Swing) would fill a bookcase, and a comprehensive set of books with everything you need to know about Windows to do anything from write miniport drivers to create.net webapps would fill a building the size of my childhood's small town public library.

Plus, expectations of artistry were much lower. You could write a program that created an 8x8 smiley face in 2 colors. You weren't expected to master DirectX or OpenGL and learn about 47 different shadowing modes, or read a book the size of War & Peace on T&L theory. You didn't even have to be much of an artist. It helped if you were, but when you're dealing with the world one 8x8 custom character at a time, artistic finesse really didn't add much to the equation.

Ditto, for music. You could get a piece of sheet music, and your main programming task was figuring out how to efficiently represent frequency+duration with a finite number of DATA statements. Today, you practically need to have the background knowledge of a professional recording engineer. Even in the Amiga era, the hardest part about dealing with SoundTracker was the fact that it crashed like a third-world discount airline. Learning to use SoundTracker itself took maybe an hour, and learning how to play it back with assembly was almost a no-brainer.

I really feel sorry for kids learning to program for the first time today. Our videogames might have sucked compared to Half Life (or even Angry Birds), but at least we had computers that a single mortal could grasp, understand, and individually do cool & worthwhile things with after just a few days of practice and experimentation.

I really feel sorry for kids learning to program for the first time today. Our videogames might have sucked compared to Half Life (or even Angry Birds), but at least we had computers that a single mortal could grasp, understand, and individually do cool & worthwhile things with after just a few days of practice and experimentation.

You know, I don't think we need to feel sorry for them, they probably feel sorry for us, the way we used to feel sorry for our senior colleagues for having had to cut punch cards when they were our age.

We have an intern, about the age I was when I was learning to turn a screen black by writing a number to a memory address, or trying to eliminate a clock cycle from a line drawing routine. That was fun stuff, don't take me wrong, but it wasn't useful, and only cool and impressive to a very tiny subset of the human population. This intern is making a mobile app that interfaces with our server application via web services, paid work immediately useful to our customers. God knows what a 20 yr old geek will be doing when he's in his late 30s, probably not fucking web services, heh.

If you want to create games of the same sort of complexity now, then you don't use DirectX or OpenGL, you use Flash. Or possibly HTML 5 canvas and JavaScript. And drawing with these is even easier: you can actually draw your sprites in a drawing tool and then you only need to write code for animating them. The underlying system handles compositing, so all that you need to do to move a sprite is set its coordinates. With HTML5, making a smiley face bounce across the screen is about a dozen lines of HTML

It has nothing to do with "peak" age of anything. It's all about having tons of time free, and very few interests that are focused such that you'll spend 12 hours a day doing something that you'd not have the time or patience to do nowadays.

It has nothing to do with "peak" age of anything. It's all about having tons of time free, and very few interests that are focused such that you'll spend 12 hours a day doing something that you'd not have the time or patience to do nowadays.

12 Hours a day doing something interesting. Wow, those were good days. Now I'm exceptionally lucky if I get 12 minutes to spend on the same task without interuption.

And to prove my point the phone rang while I was writting the above sentence.

Actually, it probably doesn't... it's just that now, your expectations about what constitutes "proficiency" are a lot higher, and you're more careful to avoid screwing things beyond your current project up. Thinking back to middle school, I really had no understanding of most of what I did. The fact that the OS was in ROM was hugely liberating -- short of having a program that did disk i/o go wildly wrong with a disc I cared about in the 1541, nothing we did software-wise really had any lasting consequences

>>>You're probably middle-aged now, you're lucky if you're able to remember what you had for breakfast.

Turkey and potatoes.With peas.Yesterday was leftover pizza. The day before was popcorn (needed to eat at my desk because of a pressing deadline). The day before that was nothing, because I slept through breakfast.

Yeah Jim Fixx said the same thing...he dropped dead in his 50s, found by a couple of smokers. I've seen people that treated their body like garbage dumps live to be nearly 100, I've seen people that ate only the healthiest foods and clean water drop dead from cancer in their 50s. Steve Jobs anyone?

While doing all that may make you feel better, its really not gonna do much at the end of the day, either you have good genes or you don't, simple as that. In my family you either live to be in your 90s or you d

Cut out the mega dose of vitamins. The case for mega doses of vitamin C was based on a very flawed thought experiment: Linus Pauling argued that dogs never got cancer, and his dog made so and so much of its own vitamin C, so people should eat so many grams of vitamin C each day to have the same vitamin C levels as dogs and never get cancer either.

Never mind the fact that dogs do get cancer, and that primates (including us, obviously), who don't make their own vitamin C, live much longer than other mammals o

iirc LOAD "$", 8 would work better for you. Just,8 was definitely needed when loading any BASIC programs but ML programs would usually be,8,1. Also I cut the solder to make my drives 8, 10, 11, and 12.:-)

What's weird is when I was between the ages of 4 and 5 it took me next to no time to memorize the command to play the games. I entered it hundreds of times without fail. But, man, put me in front of a command line these days and big question marks appear over my head even after I've used the command thousands of times over my lifetime.

You really wanted to LOAD "0:*",8,1, though, because if you left off the "0:" you'd trigger a bug in the 1541 ROMs that would eventually cause you to corrupt a program if you used save-and-replace. (The 0: indicated drive 0 of a dual drive; IIRC those were only produced for earlier PET/CBM computers with an IEEE-488 bus, and not for Commodores - though we did eventually see Lt. Kernal hard drives with partitions 0-9.)

No, no, you don't have to enter 0: when you're just loading a program. I never used the 0: designator. What's the easiet way to avoid the save-with-replace bug? Don't use it! Ever. Save the file first under a different name and then erase the original. (I can't believe I remember that.) (I also can't believe I remember learning it in RUN magazine.)

$FFD2 is burned into my brain forever. Someday, I'm going to be old, senile, and drooling on myself... but deep down inside, I'll still remember that loading a PETSCII value into the accumulator & calling $FFD2 will print it to the screen.

Oh boy I'm rusty at this but I'll give it a go. The fond memories I have of writing stuff for the C64. I remember writing an application as a kid called Organizer where you could create user-defined lists of stuff and save it to disk. I found out much later that I had created a primitive database. Fun times!

>>>I remember writing an application as a kid called Organizer where you could create user-defined lists of stuff and save it to disk.

(yawn). Bill Gates is that you? I created a video demo!- Steve JobsNo you didn't. *I* created the video and you just took the credit for it!--- Jay MinerYeah but I got all the money. Muahahahahaha.----- Ray Kassar (of Yar's Revenge)

I used to do that at radio shack, minus the obscene text. I was more into making interesting graphical patterns, or making random bits of sand fall down into randomly placed lines boxes and circles on the screen. I could usually write something like that in about 5 minutes. Sometimes the salesmen got annoyed, but then if they didn't want people running programs on it, then why was it sitting there hooked up to a TV?

According to ars technica's article on computer sales, the C64 was the #1 seller almost immediately (1983, 84, 85, 86). In the late 80s the IBM PC and clones became the #1 seller. I don't know..... maybe things were different in the UK.

Being among Slashdot's Lawn Defenders, I can back this. The C64 was clearly dominant in 1984, with "the unfortunates" among the High School techie ("nerd" and "geek" were still quite insulting at the time) caste having a VIC-20, Atari 400/800, or TI-99/4A. IBM's disastrous initial foray with the "PCjr" held them up several years in sheer acquired negative goodwill.

As I recall, the move that secured the C64's place in market history was the price drop. It originally sold for $595, but in 1984 a combination price drop (to $299) and a $100 trade-in rebate for your videogame console meant you could buy it for $200 at Toys-R-Us. That was the magic number.

Yeah in the UK the C64 was up against the sinclair spectrum (which was probably more popular at least at the time most of my mates had these) - as well as the Amstrad machines and BBC micro machines - so it had some tough competition.I had the C64 - in fact I still have mine - sat behind me right now in pieces - as it needs a keyboard repair - (need to get a replacement h key from somewhere).I recently picked up my C64 from my mothers attic - even today I think it could well be the best way to get my son in

Things were very different in the UK. It was competing against the BBC Model B (later the Master) at the high end and against the Sinclair Spectrum and ZX81 (which completely owned the market prior to the C64's launch), the Amstrad CPC (a bit later), and possibly an Acorn Atom or Electron at the low end. Schools all bought BBCs because there was government funding that paid 50% of the cost of any computer that met a fairly strict set of requirements (e.g. a dialect of BASIC with full support for structur

Yeah I learned at the tender young age of 5 how to program first on a vic-20. My old man thought it would be a learning experience if I could write my own stuff, or copy stuff out of compute, and then play around with it.

VIC-20? And you claim they're young... I remember when the PET came out. Programming Apple ]['s. The very first IBM PC's. PDP's and Pr1me's. Medusa CAD on Pr1me, that was cutting edge. When I interned we were using Honeywell computers. Take your VIC-20 and get off my lawn.

I used to disassemble the BASIC interpreter for fun. My favourite part was the one which executes a BASIC command. It pushes the address of the subroutine minus one on the stack, and then calls it with RTS (return from subroutine). Poor man's indexed jump.

Fun fact, as there was no gap between the stripes to help keep the colors from overlapping, it made the logo difficult and costly to print. Apple's president, Mike Scott, called it "the most expensive bloody logo ever designed".

It's especially funny, as the stripes were only there to keep the logo from looking "like a cherry tomato", according to the designer.

I don't know that they were the first computer company with a rainbow logo. The colorful fruit was designed late in 1976, though I can't find any ap

DRIVE-IN. Where the goal is to feel-up your date's sweater puppies w/o getting slapped. And ultimately: Reach 4th base. I think I got my sex education from that game..... of course porn on the C64 sucked. It was much much better after I upgraded to the near-photo-realistic Amiga.

Other games: Silent Service (love subs), Red Storm Rising (low subs and World war 3), Pirates, Elite, and of course arcade classics like Pitfall/Missile Command though most of them were not on my C64 but the old Atari console.

and of course, the app that made the C64 usable in the first place: Epyx FastLoad.

Oh, and my Alien Group Voicebox. Somewhere... SOMEWHERE at my parents' house, it's in a box. Must. Find. It. And the floppy that animated the funky alien face singing cheesy songs that I could never (at the time) figure out how to program myself.

Actually, I really do have to find my Alien Group voicebox. I blew my childhood's life savings on that thing, a

I think my favourite was Sid Meier's Pirates!, played that game all night on several occasions.

Someone else in this thread mentioned Archon. That was one original creative board game. I also liked the sequel Archon 2: Adept, though it lost a bit of the simplicity that made the original brilliant.

Jumpman I felt was overrated, but I really liked a similar platformer called Ultimate Wizard, which included a level editor and some neat tricks.

My cousin got one in 1984, just one year before Nintendo. I was an atari2600 die hard and when C64 came out, it was like a whole new world was opened to what games could be like. I remember playing Bruce Lee with my cousin and discovering the second player could take away one enemy and even fight the remaining enemy:) We played Bruce Lee coop for a while, and the game isn't exactly easy even then.

My favorite game of the 80s was on c64: Legacy of the Ancients. It was an easy to play RPG that was moderately complex for its time.
I remember Pool of Radiance, the beginning of all the AD&D series of games. Pool of Radience, Wasteland and Final Fantasy 1(not c64) was what inspired me to try and make the first MMORPG in 1992. It is pretty hilarious when your first video game ever is trying to be a MMORPG. I just saw MMORPGS as the future, along with instant messaging. I think many game designers wanting to code their game are guilty of trying too much on their first game.

I programmed some on C64, it is where I learned the "if" statement and graduated from print rockets I did in elementary school. The if statement opened a lot of doors for developing games, but unfortunately C64 didn't distribute a graphics library for basic, so unless you could learn how to peek/poke with no documentation, you're not making a commercial game.

If you want to write one of the wildest C64 programs ever which I don't recommend on these new systems who might not boot up if you do something bad:

This program is like giving your computer drugs, you never know what might happen. The screen might melt, the sound might start playing, it might stop saying hello, and start saying different things. The screen might split up into 4 regions. If you have a C64 by, you should code it up and run it a few times. The biggest problem with this program is that there is no way to save one specific sequence, since the system changes itself over different times, and it might be referencing time.

... My next door neighbor had a C64. I used to go over to his house and play so many games on it. It was SO fun during our childhood days. It was awesome to use my old Atari 2600 on it for two players games! It was way better than my Apple//c for gaming.;)

The C64 was a vital machine in my understanding of computers and programming. I was a hardware designer in the early 80s, mostly analogue/RF with a smattering of digital. I had no idea how processors worked or the connection between the electronics and coding. The C64 changed all that.

I bought one to play games and explore in 1983, but programming in BASIC was too limited, though I wrote a few simple "apps" that way. One day I saw a listing in a magazine for a Space Invaders implementation and it was basically raw hex that had to be POKEd in. The source was listed, in assembler, and I had that light-bulb moment where the bridge between the electronics and the code came into focus. From then on, I never wrote in BASIC. Instead, I bought the MIKRO assembler cartridge and wrote various utilities and games in assembler. I also made an EPROM programmer that plugged into the cartridge port so I "saved" my efforts to EPROM instead of tape and just booted straight into them via the cartridge port.

It was timely. During the 80s most of the hardware I worked on as a designer migrated from discrete logic to microprocessor-based designs, and thanks to the C64 I was well-placed to keep up and even lead that trend. I moved on to the 8051 and then the 68000, but I never forgot the importance of the C64 and the 6502 in that learning.

I had made a deal with my dad that if I scored well in my middle school exam he'd buy me a C64, I studied really hard and did better than he expected, I was so happy when he went to the store but when he came back he had a Sharp MZ-700 instead (apparently the salesperson told him that was a much better computer, cough cough)

As much as I had fond memories of learning how to program on the MZ-700 and trying to get the built-in plotter to plot 3d math functions, still I remember the afternoons spent at my frie

It's an excuse, and we old people are always looking for excuses to talk about "old" things (not that the C64 is old; it's not like we're talking about VIC20s).

Will there be another article in a years time : C=64 turns 31

Hopefully. It'll be introduced as the 30th anniversary of the price dropping from $595 to $195, but yeah, it'll happen, because that's how old people roll (most of us not in our wheelchairs yet, though).

Some day, you'll be old. We'll be dead but you'll be old and it will be hilarious,

The most amazing thing to me is that coders are still trying to push the video chip to new heights. It is now possible to display all 16 colors any way you want in 320 x 200, and with enough external memory you can play back video...

I connected my Vic-20 to my TV a few months ago, but I think something inside went bad -- all I could get was monochrome.

Someday, I'm going to learn how BASIC was tokenized, and try to recover my first real programming project from the cassette tape. The tape drive choked on it the last time I tried loading it, but I digitized the tape with another cassette player and burned it to archival-grade BD-R as a.wav file for safekeeping. I figure it's only ~1800 bytes. If I have to, I can go through byte by byte,

WAV-PRG and Audiotap [sourceforge.net]. Should convert that.WAV into either a.TAP or.PRG, both of which can be loaded into a modern emulator such as the excellent VICE [sourceforge.net]. Just figured I'd save you the trouble of trying to decode the pulses by hand:P

P shift-O, and all the other "first letter, shift 2nd letter" abbreviations for BASIC commands were obligatory. Not only did it save you keystrokes, it also rendered the 2nd characters as a graphic. This made you look like some kind of computer god to the unintiated. I used to know a handful of opcodes in decimal. I'd POKE in a short program that SYS'd from basic in a loop. All it did was animate 8 square sprites on the screen randomly, but it impressed those who were non computer literate, which was a

I'd rather have a C64 than what I had (Windows 98/NT machines) in school. I'd much rather have an ability to program in class than learn Office. My school experience taught me absolutely nothing (other than you don't set up website filters to block Flash games by using an exact string using the HTTP and the www, easily bypassed by not adding in the www) and even using the DOS prompt was frowned upon, after all you could break the ever so expensive computers by changing the wallpaper!

For many of us, our C64 wasn't "some little thing in our life" -- it WAS our life, or at least a staggeringly huge and important part of it.

Not only did we use it daily, to the nearly complete exclusion of almost everything else during summer, weekends, and vacations... back then, your computer defined everything about you that mattered in ways that make iPhone-vs-Android look like a pissing match. Back then, if you owned a c64, every single one of your friends did, too. If they didn't, you would have drifted apart by virtue of no longer having any shared interests. I remember sleep-overs in various living rooms with a half-dozen 1702 monitors, mountains of 1541 floppy drives (copying away all night), and barely enough room to walk. And one opened-up1541 with connectors exposed, so we could copy those few wacky games that required read errors that could only be created by yanking out the connector at the right moment in time.

Agreed. My Commodore equipment was a hugely important stepping stone to my current career. I mastered 65xx assembly on my C64, learned Z80 assembly on my C128 and learned 68k assembly, C programming and how to use a BSD TCP/IP stack on my Amiga. Installing NetBSD on my A3000 gave me an interest in BSD that forged a path to my current job in the embedded BSD field.

Had I gotten a KayPro or IBM PC instead of a C64, I'd probably still be in the tech field. But most likely, it'd be a different part. I most likely would have ended up living in a different part of the country, would have married a different woman, would have different friends, etc... Butterfly effect to the maximum.

I just can't imagine the same scenario if I had bought an HP calculator rather than a TI-81 in middle school. My life would have turned out roughly the same either way. Same goes for a lot of stuff from my youth. But my home computers were a huge influence. I imagine the same is for many people, which is why they have such a soft spot for them, defects and all.

I had one for my C64. It still brings up a bit of a sore spot about Commodore.

Commodore was using the IEEE-488 parallel interface in the PET series to connect floppy drives. But Tramel complained that the cables were too expensive and difficult to obtain. So for the VIC-20, he had engineers come up with a home-grown serial version of the IEEE-488 bus that needed fewer pins. That allowed Commodore to switch to a cheaper cable.

Commodore used their new 6522 VIA chip to interface between the serial interfac